Saturday, December 29, 2012

Why would someone want to do that? One use would be to use the animated gif as a profile pic on a social media site or an avatar for a user forum..those are two cases I can think of.

I wanted to convert this short video into an animated gif loop. The below timelapse was acheived by using the FPS override function of the MagicLantern firmware upgrade for the Canon 5D:

In order to convert the movie, I did two things:
1) in Cinelerra, export a JPG sequence
2) use ImageMagick "convert" to convert to an animated gif

Export a JPG sequence
1) In Cinelerra, you can export your movie as a JPG sequence (among other choices like an EXR/PNG/TGA or TIFF image sequence):

Depending on the number of frames you're exporting, you'll get a whole bunch of files saved to your hard drive. Since my project was set to 24fps, I had about 120 files saved to my filesystem. The file names start and end with the number of the frames you selected to export (shown in this screen cap of the Cinelerra timeline):

Once you've export all the single images from Cinelerra, use ImageMagick's "convert" program to assemble the individual images into an animated gif. Since I wanted to resize the 1080P resolution images (1920x1080) into 1/8th the size of the original, I used 240x135 as the resize value. You can see I've used other specifiers as well:
-delay 0 (no delay between frames)
-loop 0 (infinitely loop the gif)
seq*.jpg (convert is smart enough to assemble the jpgs in ordered sequence)
the other specifiers are essentially "high quality" output settings

Why Mule?

"Mules are not really stubborn. They can seem lazy because they will not put themselves in danger. A horse can be worked until it drops, but not so with a mule. The "stubborn" streak is just the mule's way of telling humans that things are not right. Mules are very intelligent and it is not a good idea to abuse a mule. They will do their best for their owner, with the utmost patience."About Mules